This second to last post in the series is focused on the specific ability of Enterprise Decision Management or EDM to reduce fixed IT costs. This comes in two main “flavors” – using EDM to reduce maintenance costs through legacy modernization and using EDM to reduce the risks and costs of outsourcing. Both legacy modernization and outsourcing are established approaches for reducing fixed IT costs and EDM can play a productive role in both:

Externalizing decisions and automating them using modern technology can give old applications a new “brain”, allowing much of the application to be retained while moving the high-volatility, high-complexity pieces to a modern architecture.

Using business rules and a business rules management system to automate these decisions makes them easier, and much cheaper, to update and change further reducing maintenance costs.

Using business rules and EDM in this approach also allows the remaining application to be outsourced more safely – the core business logic and the intellectual property associated with it are retained “on shore” in the form of managed business rules and injected into the outsourced application through decision services.

For companies applying analytics, the use of EDM can reduce the time and cost of deploying new analytic models into production by providing a well-defined, externalized decision point at which to apply the model. Many models can be represented easily with business rules, further reducing the cost of deploying and managing analytic models.